Sketchbooks for game developers now available

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When it comes to drawing something out on paper there’s a set number of choices you can usually rely on when selecting a paper pad. You have ruled paper, squared paper, graph paper, or good old plain paper. But with the proliferation of handheld gaming, notably through the DS, PSP, and most recently the iPhone, the need to scribble within a set space has grown.

These devices have a screen size that doesn’t change so when developers come to create their games they have to work within those confines. Andrew Crawshaw of Tuna Technologies realized this and decided to create a series of sketchbooks aimed at each of the handheld platforms.

Each sketchbook has a screen layout template already drawn on every page that is the exact size of the corresponding machine’s display/s. This makes it easy for the user to sketch out to a screen size. It also leads to a large amount of left over space on each sheet, but that should allow for copious amounts of notes to accompany each screen design.

As a videogame artist and designer, I often find myself sketching out ideas for games; what a game could or should look like, what should be on the screen, how big everything should be, how one menu screen should transition into another… anything and everything. It occurred to me that having a ready-made template would speed things up. I could concentrate on being creative, knowing that my ideas were being drawn at the correct size and resolution.

Three sketchbooks are available called “The Game Developer’s Sketchbook” including the following editions:

If you are a game developer focusing on any of these platforms then I can see how the sketchbooks could come in very handy. Usually ideas come when you least expect them and having one of these pads thrown in a bag ready to pull out and scribble on will surely help get that idea down quickly.

They are quite an expensive option though, at around $15 each for 64 or 96 pages, so I suspect they will be a “just in case” option rather than what you exclusively use for mapping out your design ideas on paper. You could assign one pad per game, however, allowing you to organize the information easily.

I’d suggest Andrew put together a set of plastic templates based on his layouts that could be bought and used with any paper pad. You just put the template down, draw the outline, and you are ready to go. They’d last much longer and free the developer from relying on a specific pad.